I'm not sure this is true. Anecdotally, across three Fortune 500 tech companies I've worked at, designers / web devs / program managers had Macbooks (or had the option of choosing Macbooks) even when the team was developing primarily in Windows.

I think having some people daily driving other systems may be beneficial, providing a fresh view

but if majority of your lead designers never in their lives used the taskbar they are surprised when replacing it with a dock causes outcry

> Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based.

That, likely, highly depends on your industry. Designers doing mobile application design, as well as web design from my limited experience tend to steer towards Macs. Even within my college the entire graphics design department was Macs. Of course if you are working on a Windows based product you'd in theory expect the designers to use or be familiar enough with Windows but you may be surprised.

I'd be curious to know if there are regional (country) differences in this.

The key word is ‘globally’. MacBooks are expensive, and because they are hardware they cannot be pirated. I’ve worked with Eastern European designers who were excellent but could not afford Apple hardware. You only have to look outside North America and Western Europe.

It’s tragic that because of elitism Microsoft does not hire those designers and instead hires designers who don’t care about their product.

Which country is that you are referring as Eastern Europe? I live in Eastern Europe and every designer + most of the devs I know are using Macs. I am not originally from here and my home country currently is economically worse than most Eastern Europe countries. Even there majority of designers use Macs.

You could say, you dont want the designer who is supposed to design win8 to be comfortably working with win7. Instead you want them to be more inspired by different OSes.

If people wanted a fundamentally different UI than Windows has then they wouldn't use Windows in the first place. When we went from XP to Windows 7 that was a huge improvement. It was fundamentally still the same UI with the exact same workflows, just nicer in every way.

When you have over a billion users worldwide there's an expectation that you don't treat your product like a startup's art project. I haven't met a single person who wasn't completely confused by Windows 8's UI or who liked the changes. I've seen lifelong Windows users spend 10+ minutes desperately looking for the shutdown button.

There's "inspiration" by different products but in the end you need to know your own product in order to improve it.

Really, why though? Is there something inherently wrong with satisfying user expectations?

If you want innovation, how about performance, accessibility, compatibility,...

It's one thing to be inspired, it's another to be completely ignorant of how you are breaking workflows for a billion people

Designers who could tolerate a Windows laptop in the Win7 era are probably not good designers. They were mostly inexcusably ugly, and Adobe software support was known to be not ideal until late Win8.

anyone who tolerates laptops at all is not good at judging ergonomics and usability, they are only made so you can get the necessary minimum done when you can't access the main machine and it shows

I do all my work from the sofa or floor. Bad ergonomics but good usability.

Well, I know we all have our kinks and perversions, but it's a bit unfair to push them onto unsuspecting joe

the physical and mental pain related to the terrible "keyboards" and cooling systems and small, poorly positioned screens laptops offer makes the usability nearly non-existent

You haven't really coded until you've coded under a blanket.

And I'm not an indestructible 20-year-old either :)

it's literally the worst experience, though sure, it is an experience

It is universally more ergonomic to have a device that you can’t take to where you need to be working? Unbelievable.

it's more ergonomic not having to use device that actively tries to hurt you

Now hear me for a second, I think I will blow you mind.

All laptops have a very special feature called external monitor support. And for some laptops, you can even buy docks.

Boom!

I know, it's amazing.

and then you're still stuck with the inferior performance and acoustics, why would you want to do that?

That is an expert's view which is not valued today which makes it untrue. I personally agree, I totally do, I mean my setup has triple display and plenty RAM, but sorry!